Echoes from the Holocaust: A Memoir

The daughter of a Jewish seed exporter, the author was born Mira Ryczke in 1923 in a suburb of the Baltic seaport of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Her childhood was happy, and she learned to cherish her faith and heritage. Through the 1930s, Mira's family remained in the Danzig area despite a changing political climate that was compelling many friends and neighbors to leave. With the Polish capitulation to Germany in the autumn of 1939, however, Mira and her family were forced from their home.

The Lost Letter: A Novel

A historical novel of love and survival inspired by real resistance workers in World War II Austria and the mysterious love letter that connects generations of Jewish families. A heartbreaking, heartwarming story for fans of The Nightingale, Lilac Girls, and Sarah's Key.

Our Crime Was Being Jewish: Hundreds of Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Stories

Our Crime Was Being Jewish contains 576 vivid memories of 358 Holocaust survivors. These are the true, insider stories of victims, told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents and siblings sent to the gas chambers; of starving children beaten for trying to steal a morsel of food; of people who saw their friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured.

In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. Terror in the Krakow ghetto, sadistic SS death games, cruel human medical experiments, eyewitness accounts of brutal murders of men, women, children, and even infants, and the menace of rape in occupied Poland make William & Rosalie an unusually explicit view of the chaos that World War II unleashed on the Jewish people.

The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir

In September, 1939, George Lucius Salton's boyhood in Tyczyn, Poland, was shattered by escalating violence and terror under German occupation. His father, a lawyer, was forbidden to work, but 11-year-old George dug potatoes, split wood, and resourcefully helped his family. They suffered hunger and deprivation, a forced march to the Rzeszow ghetto, then eternal separation when 14-year-old George and his brother were left behind to labor in work camps while their parents were deported in boxcars to die in Belzec. For the next three years, George slaved and barely survived in 10 concentration camps.

All But My Life

A classic of Holocaust literature, Gerda Weissmann Klein's celebrated memoir tells the moving story of a young woman's 3 frightful years as a slave laborer of the Nazis and her miraculous liberation. All But My Life stands as the ultimate lesson in humanity, hope, and friendship.

Rena's Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz

"I do not hate. To hate is to let Hitler win." - Rena Kornreich Gelissen. On March 26, 1942, the first mass transport of Jews - 999 young women - arrived in Auschwitz. Among them was Rena Kornreich, the 716th woman numbered in camp. A few days later, her sister Danka arrives and so begins a trial of love and courage that will last three years and 41 days, from the beginning Auschwitz death camp to the end of the war.

The One Man: A Novel

It's 1944. Physics professor Alfred Mendel and his family are trying to flee Paris when they are caught and forced onto a train along with thousands of other Jewish families. At the other end of the long, torturous train ride, Alfred is separated from his family and sent to the men's camp, where all of his belongings are tossed on a roaring fire. His books, his papers, his life's work. The Nazis have no idea what they have just destroyed. And without that physical record, Alfred is one of only two people in the world with his particular knowledge.

Fur Volk and Fuhrer: The Memoir of a Veteran of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler

Like many Germans, Berlin schoolboy Erwin Bartmann fell under the spell of the Zeitgeist cultivated by the Nazis. Convinced he was growing up in the best country in the world, he dreamt of joining the Leibstandarte, Hitler's elite Waffen SS unit. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, and just 17-years-old, Erwin fulfilled his dream on Mayday 1941, when he gave up his apprenticeship at the Glaser bakery in Memeler Strasse and walked into the Lichterfelde barracks in Berlin as a raw, volunteer recruit.

I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust

Imagine being a 13-year-old girl in love with boys, school, family - life itself. Then suddenly, in a matter of hours, your life is shattered by the arrival of a foreign army. This is the memoir of Elli Friedmann, who was 13 years old in March 1944, when the Nazis invaded Hungary. It describes her descent into the hell of Auschwitz, a concentration camp where, because of her golden braids, she was selected for work instead of extermination. In intimate, excruciating details she recounts what it was like.

Amazon Customer says:"Touching and Important Story - Terrible Audio Performance"

The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust

Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a slave labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman, so she went underground.

Auschwitz #34207: The Joe Rubinstein Story

Shortly before dawn on a frigid morning in Radom, Poland, twenty-one year-old Joe answered a knock at the door of the cottage he shared with his widowed mother and siblings. German soldiers forced him onto a crowded open-air truck. Wearing only an undershirt and shorts, Joe was left on the truck with no protection from the cold. By the next morning, several around him would be dead. From there, things got worse for young Joe, much worse.

Pastel Orphans

In 1930s Berlin, young Henrik, the son of a Jewish father and Aryan mother, watches the world around him crumbling: people are rioting in the streets, a strange yellow star begins appearing in shop windows, and friends are forced to move - or they simply disappear.

Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany

In 1941, Marie Jalowicz Simon, a 19-year-old Berliner, made an extraordinary decision. All around her, Jews were being rounded up for deportation, forced labor, and extermination. Marie took off her yellow star, turned her back on the Jewish community, and vanished into the city. In the years that followed, Marie lived under an assumed identity, forced to accept shelter wherever she found it.

In 1945, in a now-famous piece of World War II archival footage, four-year-old Michael Bornstein was filmed by Soviet soldiers as he was carried out of Auschwitz in his grandmother's arms. Survivors Club tells the unforgettable story of how a father's courageous wit, a mother's fierce love, and one perfectly timed illness saved his life and how others in his family from Zarki, Poland, dodged death at the hands of the Nazis time and again with incredible deftness.

The Milliner's Secret

June 1940. As Paris, the City of Light, approaches its darkest hour, a young woman treads the line between survival and collaboration. Londoner Cora Masson has reinvented herself as Coralie de Lirac, using a false claim to aristocratic birth to launch herself as a fashionable milliner. When the Nazis invade, the influence of a high-ranking lover protects her business. But the cruel demands of war - and of love - cannot be kept at bay forever.

The Master of Auschwitz:: Memoirs of Rudolf Hoess, Kommandant SS

The first-hand account of the life, career, and the practices of horror at Auschwitz, written by Auschwitz Kommandant SS Rudolf Hoss as he awaited execution for his crimes. Including his psychological interviews at Nuremberg.

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Jew and a medical doctor, the prisoner Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared death for a grimmer fate: to perform "scientific research" on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the man who became known as the infamous "Angel of Death" - Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele's personal research pathologist. In that capacity he also served as physician to the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who worked exclusively in the crematoriums and were routinely executed after four months.

Mischling

It's 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood. As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain.

The Paris Architect

Like most gentiles in Nazi-occupied Paris, architect Lucien Bernard has little empathy for the Jews. So when a wealthy industrialist offers him a large sum of money to devise secret hiding places for Jews, Lucien struggles with the choice of risking his life for a cause he doesn't really believe in. Ultimately he can't resist the challenge and begins designing expertly concealed hiding spaces - behind a painting, within a column, or inside a drainpipe - detecting possibilities invisible to the average eye. But when one of his clever hiding spaces fails and the immense suffering of Jews becomes incredibly personal, he can no longer deny reality.

Secrets She Kept

All her life, Hannah Sterling longed for a close relationship with her estranged mother. Following Lieselotte's death, Hannah determines to unlock the secrets of her mother's mysterious past and is shocked to discover a grandfather living in Germany. Thirty years earlier, Lieselotte's father is quickly ascending the ranks of the Nazi party, and a proper marriage for his daughter could help advance his career.

Survival in the Shadows: Seven Jews Hidden in Hitler's Berlin

The remarkable true story of two families that survived against all odds in the heart of the Nazi capital. Survival in the Shadows rivetingly chronicles the incredible survival of seven German Jews in Berlin through the final and most deadly years of the Holocaust.

The Hiding Place

At one time, Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that she had a story to tell. For the first 50 years of her life, nothing out of the ordinary ever happened to her. She was a spinster watchmaker living contentedly with her sister and their elderly father in the tiny house over their shop in Haarlem. Their uneventful days, as regulated as their own watches, revolved around their abiding love for one another. But with the Nazi invasion and occupation of Holland, everything changed....

Publisher's Summary

Following the success of Forgotten Voices of the Great War, the series now chronicles one of human histories darkest hours. The author comes to the project following her significant work in recording the experiences of Holocaust survivors for the Imperial War Museum sound archive, one of the most important archives of its kind in the world. The intertwined moving and revealing interviews reveal the sheer complexity and horror of the Holocaust. The great majority of survivors suffered considerable physical and psychological wounds, yet the overall story is far from being just gloom and doom. There are many poignant vignettes describing acts of charity, reciprocity and kindness in the face of the most extreme form of barbarism. As well as revealing the story of the Holocaust as directly experienced by victims, these testimonies also illustrate how, even enduring the most harsh and degrading conditions and treatment as well as suffering massive family losses, hope, the will to survive, and the human spirit shines through.

If you are intrested. Two websites I find very good are: http://voices.iit.edu.interview.html and http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu (Voice/Vision of holocaust survivors from University of Michigan)
The difference between these and those at the holocaust memorial web site is that they were done in 1946 in DP camps. I have to remember that the interviewer is a professor sticking to the facts because I think he was a lousy interviewer, but thank goodness someone thought to do this. Most were done in German and Yiddish and translated to English. Some audio but text to speech helps.

I read and listen to a lot of WWII history. Every time I think I'm beyond being shocked at the atrocities of the war, I'm proven wrong. 9 times out of 10 it's a story from the Holocaust that gets me.

This audiobook, told in the first person by the actual people involved, is no exception. The tone tends to be matter-of-fact, rather than emotional, but that adds to the impact of what you're hearing. One of the stories hit so close to home that I broke down and wept at one point, and that's not the sort of thing I do often.

My only complaint is that the work was too short, skipped too many parts of Europe, and skipped over large sections of the war. It's entirely possible that I wouldn't have been satisfied until they'd made a 100 hour compilation.

I highly recommend this audiobook, as well as the other Forgotten Voices books to have come out of the Imperial War Museum. This one, however, is not for the faint of heart. The soldier's war was much different than what was experienced in the ghettos, concentration camps and hideouts throughout Europe. This is an unblinking chronicle of some of the worst things humans have done to one another in recorded history.

The Holocaust. Mankind at its worst. You think you've heard it all before.

But this book is different. The individual accounts from actual survivors touch your very soul. I am so grateful for the courage of the survivors to share their stories. You hear how the survivors struggle to tell even their own children why they were in camps, and what happened to their friends and families. Touching. Moving.

I have been reading holocaust literature during the last year and every story is so unique. . This is the first book I have listened to where there are actual interviews with survivors and since I listened to the audio version, it was even more poignant. Although heartbreaking it was also touching in many ways because of the obvious acts of charity in the face of extreme cruelty. As much as I read about it, still unimaginable. Te audible portion was a little difficult in parts because of the accents, but it didn't detract from the content.

The terrible years of the holocaust come to life as the survivors tell their moving accounts of the hatred and the unbelievable treatment these people tell. It was not long ago that scares me & listening to their voices, it could have been yesterday. Books like these should be required reading in senior schools as these survivors fade away there will be nothing to remember them by. These were people whom we would know and what happened to them is still almost unbelievable of what man can do to his fellow beings.

It is a totally unbelievable thing of how quickly "we" forget what these precious souls have endured under the realization of evil NOT stopped.

Are you listening? These blessed souls lived through the "all is well" "we can talk to them" "they love peace" if we do not learn from the words of these wonderful souls who lived, breathe, and endured the hatred of a man who said "I only want to help my people" "we want peace, we mean no one any harm"

Can you imagine a group of people breaking down your door and beating you with a perfect hatred and your family divided and you remember those who raised the alarm; do they sound stupid now, are they now alarmists???

Please read this book and remember they once lived in peace and prosperity. I highly recommend this book.

This book is like listening to a documentary; several holocaust survivors are interviewed and you can hear their real voices and stories. The interviews are not only with Jewish holocaust survivors but with POW's and a Jehovah's Witness as well. Very captivating, with the most moving part being when you hear the stories of each person's liberation and the hope that they felt at the time, inspiring really.

I was tickled that Denis Avey was interviewed and I was able to hear his voice IRL as I have just finished listening to his 2011 book, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz (which I highly recommend).

Audio is the right way to understand this book: the actual voices of the survivors telling their own stories have been woven together to tell the wider story of the Holocaust itself. The images and events evoked are heartbreaking, and yet the structure has made it possible to grasp the facts and feel addressed directly by the courageous men and women who've put their memories on record.

6 of 6 people found this review helpful

Svandis

BORGHOLM, Sweden

4/16/12

Overall

"Interesting"

This book was very interesting.Hearing the survivers tell their own story in their own words... WOW. So emotional.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Jeannette

wisbech,, cambridgeshire, United Kingdom

11/28/07

Overall

"heartbreaking and very moving."

i have listened to this audiobook about 4 times now,because i just cannot believe what those poor people had to go through,and if i was one of those poor people,i do not think i would have the courage to tell,so honestly my story...

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Dallas Winston 9

East Yorkshire

2/9/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"Moving accounts from survivors of the Holocaust."

Would you consider the audio edition of Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust to be better than the print version?

Definitely. Hearing first hand accounts is the best way to engage with people and their stories.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Each person added something to the collected narrative.

What about Andrew Sachs’s performance did you like?

He let the survivors tell their stories. More of a documentary narrator who guides the reader through the work, rather than directly deliver the text.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No. I had to stop and reflect on the accounts told.

Any additional comments?

This audiobook is a strange case when I would say, without a doubt, is a better listen than a read. The survivors voices convey so much emotion.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Julie

Peterborough, United Kingdom

1/13/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"loved this book"

If you could sum up Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust in three words, what would they be?

Brilliant moving sad

What did you like best about this story?

Sensitive narrator

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No would be too much to take in

Any additional comments?

do not like writing much as do not want to spoil story for others

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

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